Social Media

Google Reader Stats are Bullshit (With Proof)

Google Reader stats, in case you don't know, are bullshit. In fact, Feedburner stats for many top blogs are bullshit due to the effect of default feeds. Want 80,000 free subscribers? How about 200K or more? Read on.

A default feed, in case you don't know, is a feed which is presented to users on signup. Google Reader, for instance, pushes new users to these feed bundles: instead of searching for feeds you like, just grab a bundle on a certain topic. This is a great boost for those sites that can get themselves listed in these bundles: often by striking a deal with the feedreader company or being friends with the owner.

At Mashable we know this topic very well: back in late 2006, we got ourselves a default feed on the Pageflakes homepage, resulting in a huge boost for our subscriber numbers - 300K+ at one point. Except that if you visited Pageflakes once and never came back, you were still counted as a subscriber. Pageflakes eventually made changes to correct this overcount, but people were unlikely to trust our Feedburner count after that. And yet the issue continues to affect other blogs.

Google Reader's Default Feeds

This weekend Google Reader released its stats, and I see the exact same problem: all the "top" feeds are actually the default feeds. In fact, many of the most popular feeds don't actually exist. Neither do the subscribers. Some examples:

Footbag Worldwide is a site about the sport of hacky sack, which is a bit of a joke sport even in the US. And yet, it's massively popular on Google Reader, with 74,043 subscribers! You'll automatically get subscribed to this feed if you click the Sports bundle once you've signed up to Google Reader ( http://www.footbag.org/index2/index.rss ).

Here's the real clincher: the Footbag Worldwide feed does not exist. Either Google's engineers made a mistake and included the wrong URL, or the feed has since been discontinued. It either doesn't load or loads with no content. We can therefore conclude that Google Reader will add around 74K to your subscriber count if your feed is in the Sports bundle, even if that feed doesn't actually exist.

The TED conference is a pretty popular event, but they'd have a lot of trouble fitting their 65,650 subscribers (!) into a room. The Typepad feed for the conference is a default in the "Thinkers" bundle, which is how it garnered so many subscribers. If you think there's still a chance that 65K people really love TED, think again: in June, TED moved its blog away from Typepad to a shiny new setup with a Feedburner feed. The old one now redirects. Only 1,451 people have since joined the Feedburner feed, suggesting that the default position added around 64K "fake" subscribers.

Part of the bundle for "Photography", this blog has a massive 56,120 subs in Google Reader. All these subs are on the feed http://durhamtownship.com/index.rdf. Now go to Durham Township, and you'll see that feed is listed nowhere. Instead, the only available RSS feed is http://feeds.feedburner.com/durhamtownship. So Google has probably grabbed the wrong feed, is using an old one, or their bot found a feed that's invisible to my browser and most other humans. How many subscribers does the real feed have? A massive 77! We can therefore conclude that having a default feed in the Photography bundle guarantees you around 56K "subscribers".

This blog has an impressive 57,145 subs and is located in the "Photography" bundle. What's odd is that the feed on Google Reader with all these subs ( filemagazine.com/thecollection/atom.xml ) isn't visible if you visit the site directly. Nor did Firefox find it using autosubscribe. Perhaps they did something clever and redirected all their feeds to the Feedburner URL listed on the site? Nope: the Feedburner chicklet lists only 5666 subscribers - less than 10% of the number reported on Google Reader. This confirms our conclusion above that being listed in the Photography bundle adds around 56K subs to Google Reader's count.

You can pretty much go through all the default feeds on Google Reader and find these anomalies, but I'll stop here. Feel free to add your own.

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Conclusions

Some conclusions to draw:

1. Google Reader stats are bullshit because simply being the default feed in any of those bundles will increase your stats by at least 50K to 80K. The quality or content of the feed is irrelevant, and the feed doesn't even need to exist.

2. My early tests have shown that news, science and technology feeds get the biggest benefit from this problem.

3. The case of the Footbag feed shows that Google Reader probably does not check whether subscribers are active or not (you can't read a feed that doesn't exist). Most of the subs on these feeds likely took Google Reader for a spin and abandoned it the same day.

6. In phone calls with Feedburner last week (yes, I do research!), I learned that FeedBurner doesn't enforce any rules regarding stat counts and particularly default feeds. They are, however, extremely nice people.

7. This problem is not limited to Google Reader, but applies to many feedreaders and startpages large and small. We've spoken to Feedburner about problems with Webwag, Blogrovr and Pageflakes adding tens of thousands of "readers" overnight due to default feeds. We have since asked to be removed from all the defaults we know of. We may be listed on more that we don't know about.

8. Even when feedreaders discount inactive readers on a regular basis, default feeds will still overcount because thousands of people take RSS readers for trial runs every day.

9. The easiest way to get a default feed on one of these startpages is to own it, promise to promote it on your blog or be friends with the person who runs it.

10. Some blogs are the default feeds on every feedreader on the web (BoingBoing, Techcrunch etc). Their stats may be way out.

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Other people are covering Google Reader stats today, including a few mentions of the default feed issue.

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